Celebrate National Braille Literacy Month with a Geeky T-Shirt in Braille from Tees For Your Head

January is National Braille Literacy Month, and Tees For Your Head offers a very unusual way to honor the celebration: a t-shirt for language geeks with its message in braille. The "Feel the Love" t-shirt features a message in braille.

Feel the Love T-shirt Celebrates Braille

For the sighted, braille is a secret code. For those who read through their fingertips, braille is a path to increased independence.

Santa Cruz, CA (PRWEB) January 24, 2013

For the sighted, braille is a secret code. For those who read through their fingertips, braille is a path to increased independence. Tees For Your Head commemorates the code with a geeky t-shirt.

Designer Karin Carter is attracted to any system of communication, and the idea of doing a braille t-shirt struck her as interesting: "I hope people don't interpret this t-shirt as disrespectful. Different ways of communicating, such as braille, Morse Code, semaphore, and sign language, are fascinating. I have to admit that I touch the braille signs in elevators or other public places where braille is used. I can't even tell how many bumps I'm touching, let alone how they're arranged. It's a real skill to read it with your fingers!"

Braille is named for the teenaged Frenchman, Louis Braille, who invented the code (it's not a language) that is based on "l'écriture nocturne" invented by Charles, Barbier, a French Army captain. Barbier's code was used by soldiers to communicate at night without making a sound and without using light to read. It was a raised-dot code, but it was both limited (it lacked punctuation and abbreviations, and was based on the sounds of French) and complicated (it used 12 dots instead of Braille's six).

Braille used Barbier's concept as a starting point, and made a simpler code that corresponded to letters rather than sounds, and his approach made the code applicable to any language that used the Latin alphabet. Eventually, the complications of non-Latin alphabets were addressed, too, by the International Congress on Work for the Blind. It took over 100 years for the code to be standardized around the world, since other writing systems were competing with braille.

Despite this decline in usage in the U.S., Louis Braille's code has proven to be both beautiful and lasting. Geeky concept, geeky t-shirt: a great combination.

About Tees For Your Head

The online home of geeky t-shirts for lovers of the arts and sciences was launched in 2012. Husband and wife team Tom Bates and Karin Carter have an arts and science background and create their own designs to appeal to the geeks of the world. Santa Cruz tee shirt designs are in the works for this Santa Cruz-based business.

By the way, Tees For Your Head shirts are worn on the body, not really on the head. Just a helpful hint.